I’m looking at Walrus as a long-term building block rather than a short-term narrative. The project is designed to solve a simple problem: blockchains are bad at storing large files. Walrus addresses this by running a decentralized blob storage network on Sui. Files are encoded, split into pieces, and distributed across independent storage providers. Because of erasure coding, the system doesn’t need every piece online at once to function.
WAL is used inside the protocol to pay for storage and related services. It can also support staking and governance, which helps ensure storage providers behave correctly and that changes to the system aren’t controlled by a single party.
In practice, Walrus can be used by dApps that need to store NFT media, game assets, datasets, or application data that’s too large for on-chain storage. Developers can combine on-chain logic with off-chain blob storage without losing decentralization.
Long term, they’re aiming to become a shared storage layer for many applications. I’m watching whether they can maintain reliability, predictable costs, and simple tooling as the network grows.